Month: June 2019

Albany Times-Union op-ed published June 18 2019

Last month two NY Giants came to Broome County to support local bail and jail reform efforts. Expectations of change are high, for on January 1 new legislation comes into effect designed to eliminate cash bail for most misdemeanor and non-violent charges. JustLeadership USA, and the Vera Institute which facilitated the Giants’ visit, expect county jail populations across the state to drop by over 50%.

One would not know this from looking around the Southern Tier. In Cortland County, embroiled in a battle to build a new jail, local officials bluntly state that “recent justice reforms will have little or no impact.” The Onondaga District Attorney predicted long ago that bail reform would do little to change jail numbers, given existing reforms. One hears the same in Tompkins county, where a community bail fund and alternatives to incarceration are well in place. A local data expert in Broome expects no more than a ten percent reduction.

It is indeed hard to imagine approaching a 50 percent reduction. Bail will remain in place for all persons charged with violent felonies and key misdemeanor charges, leaving the poor still in jail. Bail reform will also not affect the growing number of persons in our jails due to technical parole violations. Nor will bail reform rollback the growing use of jails as mental health and detox centers.  Most of those in Broome’s jail—80 percent according to our Sheriff—have mental health and substance use illnesses for which we have almost no long-term treatment options. For poorer counties, bail reform is unlikely to prevent the recycling of these persons in and out of the jail, often on escalating charges.

Implementing bail reform needs fierce work too: expanding pretrial and parole supervision and staff, hiring new county justice coordinators, getting police to issue appearance tickets rather than booking persons on higher charges, persuading judges to release persons rather remanding more to jail, and so on. For counties this is an unfunded mandate that will cost $ millions. It is unclear who would monitor the bill’s implementation. Community organizations and non-profits upstate certainly do not have the resources.

How will the police, courts, district attorneys, sheriffs, and legislators respond to reforms that challenge their practices? How will judges calculate risk? Judgements based on informal criteria are likely to reproduce outcomes based on the wealth and race of the defendants. Will jail for those awaiting trial simply be replaced by e-shackles? How much will supervision and surveillance by probation, drug court and other officers expand? We do not know. There is little transparency in court and policing practices, and no real oversight over sheriffs and county jails.

Reform didn’t need to be so expensive or complicated. Ending cash bail outright, as has been developed in other states and Washington DC, would have been far simpler. We now face a muddled, expensive compromise, one unlikely to achieve significant decarceration even as it widens other components of mass incarceration and surveillance.

This is now a worrisome pattern for criminal justice reforms. Raise the Age reforms led to an estimated $500 million in new youth jails, expanded sheriff budgets, and the increasing supervision of youth. Closing Rikers is predicated on spending at least $11 billion to build new jails in the poorer parts of New York City. As New York Giant Michael Thomas told me before the community forum, building new modern jails in order to close old ones makes no sense if we want to overcome decades of mass incarceration. It is an insight that needs to be applied to the cascade of reforms ushering from Albany.

William Martin teaches at Binghamton University and is a co-author of “After Prisons? Freedom, Decarceration, and Justice Disinvestment.”

This report must start with a correction:  I mislead readers recently on the amount of money the Sheriff extracts from families of those in Broome County’s jail.  Focusing on high profits made on commissary purchases—from 230% profit on selling a bible to 560% on a pack of Ramen—led to an estimate of $102,000 in illegal profits on sales of $318,000.

This estimate however is incorrect, for new information reveals a much much higher source of money extracted from those in the jail:

Kickback payments from an avaricious private phone company have over the tenure of Sheriff Harder surely cost the families of Broome’s incarcerated literally millions of dollars.

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If you think your phone bill is too high, consider the fate of families who have someone stuck in the Broome County jail.  They are the targeted poor of the county:  the vast majority are in jail because they can’t afford the excessively high bail set by local judges for petty charges, face technical parole violations, or were captured by federal immigration officers.  At best, only one in four in the jail has been convicted of a crime. Your wife, husband, son, daughter or best friend is most likely there, quite simply, because they are too poor and far far too often Black or Latinx.

It is bad enough if you’ve lost your loved one’s contribution to rent, food, and childcare.  And now you have to send money to the jail commissary to keep them fed, washed, and clothed.   You naturally want to speak to them in this desperate situation.  Woe indeed, if you work long hours during the week or live a distance away for there are no weekend visiting times for the Broome County Jail, unlike for New York’s State prisons, Federal prisons, NY City jails,  and other nearby county jails (e.g. Cortland and Tompkins counties).

Broome County really does stand out in making it difficult for families.

So you need to call.  You go to the Sheriff’s jail website or look at notices in the jail’s waiting room and find just this posted: “Inmate Telephone:  GTL (866) 230-7761”.  That’s it. You wonder what “GTL” might be.  You call the number and it’s a private corporation and they offer to set up an account to pull money from you for calls from the jail. But ask what a call costs, and they can’t tell you, they refuse to tell you, indeed they cut you off when you ask.  You ask others in the jail visiting room, and a chorus of voices protest they are spending over $2/minute to call, amounting to hundreds of dollars.  It is scam widely known as documented on Youtube:

Global Tel Link video: Prison Profiteers

Wiser heads in the visiting room advise you to never accept a collect call with its heavy fees, and to sign up for a GTL account with only a local area code number.  Calls for outside the local area can be multiple dollars a minute—too bad if you are from another area code or calling from out of town (here is how to get a free google voice 607 area code for Broome County).[1]  And be sure you don’t pay for a call with a credit card since you will get an additional $10 or more cash fee added to GTL’s own setup and bewildering “fees” from GTL and payment services (e.g. Moneygram).

So you eventually figure this all out and find the cheapest rate is $4.35 for the first minute and 40 cents for each additional instate minute—that’s $10 for a 15 minute call. It need not be this way:  people in state prison pay only 65 cents while a 15-minute call from a Federal prison is $3.75.[2]

Why is staying in touch with loved ones, which reduces recidivism rates,[3] so expensive in Broome County?

Its simple: Broome County is determined to make as much money off incarceration as it can:  a contract signed by the Sheriff and Patrick Brennan, the Deputy County Executive, provides for massive kickbacks to the jail.   A copy of the contract obtained by a freedom of information request reveals that the Sheriff receives “forty-four percent (44%) of the gross revenue billed or prepaid by every completed call.”

And what does the kickback amount to?  Another FOIL document, attached here, records a payment to the jail of over $25,000 per month, totaling $319,858 in 2018.

Where does this money end up?  Like commissary profits, it isn’t visible in the accounts of the jail as laid out in the 2019 Broome County Budget (see page 156 for corrections revenue)  or in county audits of jail accounts (see the latest commissary audit here).  Letters to the County Executive and State Commission of Correction asking for accounting of these monies have gone unanswered.

We need not accept this. Over a decade of public protest and mobilization against such rapacious exploitation has resulted in the much lower charges in state and federal prisons—and even now free phone service in other cities.[4]  The same changes in contracts and legislation could, indeed should, happen soon in Broome County, and people are getting agitated.  Stay tuned.

Notes/Hyperlink sources

[1] See this site from the community organization Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier, for information if you have a loved one in the jail; it has information on visiting, mail, commissary, etc.

[2] The current state of costs from jails and prisons is provided here and here. Broome is among a long list of the worse offenders in NY State.

[3] Close family ties are critical; see the summery by Alex Friedman, “Lowering Recidivism through Family Communication” among others.

[4] See the resources and work done among others by the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, and Prison Policy Initiative, and the Prison Phone Justice among others.  See for example the February 2019 report “State of Phone Justice: Local jails, state prisons and private phone providers” by Peter Wagner and Alexi Jones. Recommendations on how prisons and jails and legislatures can lower costs are here. Ending commission payments in all their forms is critical.